The set of things a person has to do in the future. One speaks of
the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack.
“I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed
way down on my stack.” “I haven't done it yet because every
time I pop my stack something new gets pushed.” If you are
interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, “My stack
overflowed” means “I forget what we were talking
about.” The implication is that more items were pushed onto the
stack than could be remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The
usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of
plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on
the top they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest
spring up a bit. See also push and
pop.

Many people who realized the
importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to
these structures: stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion
storages, cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out
(“LIFO”) lists, and even yo-yo lists!

The term “stack” was originally coined by Edsger
Dijkstra, who was quite proud of it.